Interview: Supersphere Rocks the World of Live Streaming

Supersphere, an immersive technology and content company, is
rocking the world of live streaming (http://superspherevr.com/live-vr/).
According to Lucas Wilson, founder and executive producer, “We’re in the
business of immersive storytelling that helps clients deliver groundbreaking
experiences of any scale, on any platform. We thrive on the challenges of this
exciting medium, and right now, we’re seeing big demand for live streaming for
such events as music concerts, e-sports, corporate and product-announcements –
you name it.”

What makes Supersphere
a standout in live streaming?

Wilson: There are several factors that contribute to our success. Our
team is fully dedicated to delivering high-impact live-streaming immersive (VR/AR/XR)
content to audiences. Clients don’t need to worry about whether the shoot is
360°, 180°, 4K, or HD. We do the heavy lifting with our live-streaming technology and workflow, which includes the
best software and hardware, so that clients are only limited by their
imagination.

We have also designed and built cutting-edge 12G
glass-to-glass flypacks that are fully optimized for live immersive streaming. Each flypack is standard
equipped with several Z CAM K1 Pro stereoscopic 180°
cameras and Z CAM S1 Pro 360° cameras, and it’s also customizable to any camera
as productions demand.

And we have a novel approach to multi-geometry
(mesh/rectilinear/equirectangular) requirements. Our flypacks can handle live
360°, 180°, 4K, or HD production and seamlessly mix and match all geometries.
This gives our clients unlimited freedom to be creative and imaginative in
developing their content and venues. To accomplish this, our go-to software is
Assimilate’s SCRATCH VR; we include it in all the flypacks for our live
streaming workflow. SCRATCH VR is the only tool on the market that has the
necessary combination of what we and our customers need – real-time geometry
conversion, extensive color grading and camera painting features, highly
efficient workflow, and incredible speed/performance for live streaming. No
other tool does this.

Tell us more about your approach to the geometry needed for live
streaming.

Wilson: With geometry independence, we’re
offering a new model for live streaming. The broadcast world is long used
to resolutions and frame rates easily mixing and matching. Our technology
allows geometry to also be freely mixed and matched: Equirectangular 360º
and 180º, Mesh, Fisheye, Rectilinear, Monoscopic, Stereoscopic, HD and 4K
pan and scan from within a 360º image, 4K windows placed within 360º or
180º. And not only cameras. Add real-time Unity environments to a video
stream and position video images within the environment. The flypack also
includes built-in video distribution network (VDN) encoding and delivery for
live streaming to any platform or custom player.

Supersphere flypack

What are some of
your latest live-streaming productions?

Wilson: Recently, the Supersphere team worked with Butch Walker (www.butchwalker.com),
the legendary singer, songwriter, and record producer, to live stream the 2018
Talpanga Concert for Pancreatic Cancer on November 3 & 4 to Butch Walker’s
Facebook page. The concert was held at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in
Topanga Canyon, CA. The event is an Autumn Leaves Project (https://www.autumnleavesproject.org/
), which Walker founded in honor of his father who succumbed to pancreatic
cancer, and who holds the belief that no one should ever face this diagnosis
alone.

This project is an example of how SCRATCH VR is a real workhorse
for us in real-time geometry conversion, camera control and painting cameras. We use
SCRATCH VR constantly during our shows, but it especially shines in a situation
like this — an outdoor show that starts in daylight and ends in darkness. Our
team is continually tweaking color and camera settings as the light changes to ensure
we are always streaming the best image possible.

2018 Talpanga Concert for Pancreatic Cancer

Another recent project was the live streaming of the
keynotes and the e-sports events at the Oculus OC5 annual
virtual reality developer conference held
in San Jose, CA. Oculus partnered with Supersphere to produce the VR live
streams via Oculus Venues app, a social VR app, so that users were able to
interact with each other.

The content was streamed
exclusively to the Oculus Venues app. SCRATCH VR’s flexibility allowed us to
explore different creation paradigms, inserting other images from different
geometries as picture-in-picture, or similar, and gave us the ability to
consistently up our production game and explore new options.

Image courtesy of Oculus

What other projects do you have in the works?

Wilson: Some of our recent music projects include work with
Thievery Corporation, bands Spafford, Lettuce, and Ghost Note with our friends
at Nugs.Net, as well as two days of immersive production at the Rolling Loud
festival in Los Angeles. For all the typical privacy reasons, many of our upcoming projects are under wraps. However, watch for our VR project
tied to the horror classic “Night of the Living Dead,” coming in a
multi-platform, multi-format immersive experience next year. For this project,
we are working closely with the late director George Romero’s production
company, Image Ten. It’s literally a
thrill to be working on a film of this caliber…a cultural touchstone.